Linux System Administrator

Optiver - Chicago, IL

Full-time - Mid Level

Chicago, IL

Securities, Commodity Contracts, and Other Financial Investments and Related Activities

About the position

As a Linux System Administrator at Optiver, you will be an integral part of our Linux Systems Engineering Team, ensuring that our trading servers operate at peak performance. This role is crucial in maintaining a highly-customized environment where proprietary tools and technology are utilized. You will be responsible for deploying, maintaining, monitoring, and operating a large fleet of predominantly bare-metal UNIX servers. Your work will directly impact the reliability of our production environment, which is essential for trading operations, especially during extreme market conditions. Your responsibilities will include tackling the life cycle of servers, building and deploying new solutions, and managing system capacity through performance monitoring. You will also be expected to fix and analyze technical incidents, solve ad hoc technical problems, and lead initiatives towards intelligent automation. As a bridge between hardware and software, you will research new technologies and solutions, implementing them or enhancing existing systems to ensure optimal performance. At Optiver, we value a decisive nature, an engineering mindset, and a preference for simple solutions. Your contributions will help us maintain our systems' reliability and support our technology evolution in a controlled manner. No prior trading or financial experience is required, as our onboarding program will equip you with the necessary knowledge about our business and the trading environment.

Responsibilities

• Deploy, maintain, monitor, and operate a large fleet of predominantly bare-metal UNIX servers.
• Tackle the life cycle of a server and build and deploy new solutions.
• Performance monitoring and managing the system capacity.
• Fix and analyze technical incidents, solve technical ad hoc problems.
• Lead initiatives towards intelligent automation.
• Act as the connection between hardware and software.
• Research new technologies and solutions, implement them or build better alternatives.

Requirements

• A minimum of 3 years experience designing, deploying and supporting large scale Linux/Unix server environments.
• Good knowledge of Linux Kernel internals.
• Solid coding skills in Python and a strong desire to automate.
• Experience within a high-performance computer environment where results matter.
• Infrastructure-as-Code experience, preferably with Ansible.
• Knowledge of virtualization and networking.
• A proactive approach to problem solving.
• Ability to clearly explain thoughts through written and verbal communication.

Nice-to-haves

• A developer mindset to help build the right tools for continual improvement.
• Naturally curious about hardware and software interactions.
• Willingness to seek out opportunities to leave comfort zones and adapt to frequent changes.

Benefits

• 25 paid vacation days and market holidays.
• Fully paid health insurance.
• Daily breakfast and lunch.
• Training opportunities.
• 401(k) match up to 50%.
• Charitable match opportunities.
• Regular social events and clubs.